So You Want to Digitize 40,000 CDs

Your a community radio station with a large CD collection. You know you need to ‘go digital’, but your not exactly sure how to get there. You know that just sitting down with iTunes and a big hard drive isn’t going to do you a lot of good. What do you do? This was where KEXP (kexp.org) was two years ago, when I walked through the doors at their old Dexter and Denny studios. At this time, KEXP was in the midst of their first big capital campaign to raise money for a new studio on the Seattle Center campus. Having been a long time supporter, I wasn’t surprised when I received a call from JeeYoung Dobbs asking if I would like to take a studio tour and learn more about the ‘new home’. I eagerly accepted, but also let her know that I had more than money to offer. With my 20 years of experience in music technology, I was interested in seeing if there was anything I could do to help them with their technology needs.

So fast forward two years, and KEXP now has a very well defined CD and content ingestion workflow, and is currently adding several hundred CD’s a week to their digital library. This is largely thanks to the efforts of Dylan Flesch, Media Asset Librarian at KEXP, who I worked with to define the high level processes used to ingest their library, as well as their weekly rotation and reviews. I am now in the middle of setting up a similar, but in ways even more complex system for KBCS (kbcs.fm), and will be using those learnings to help out KSER (kser.org) to digitize their library.

This is the first of a series of posts going into the processes we have created, the software we have developed (both open and closed source), and the things we have learned.